The Last Days of Henry VIII: Conspiracy, Treason and Heresy at the Court of the Dying Tyrant (31 page)

For three days, Henry’s body lay within his secret apartments in the Palace of Westminster while the power brokers in his Council fashioned the shape of the government of the new young king, Edward VI. They also debated long and hard about whether to execute Norfolk, who was doubtless still anxiously pacing up and down in his lodgings in the Tower of London, expecting, every minute, the dreaded knock on his door that would summon him to the last short walk to the scaffold. The bureaucrats also needed many days to complete the complicated arrangements for the king’s funeral, which was to be a suitably impressive affair despite the state of the royal exchequer, still only slowly recovering from the bankruptcy caused by the war in 1544–5.
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Elaborate hearses had to be constructed – not vehicles in the modern sense but temporary structures fitted with a myriad of mounted candles – beneath which the coffin would rest while Masses,
diriges
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and other religious services were said. One was required for the palace chapel, another for Syon, the midway resting point on Henry’s last journey, and a third within St George’s Chapel inside Windsor Castle. Almost 33,000 yards of black cloth and 8,085 yards of black cotton had to be found and purchased from London merchants at a cost of around £12,000,
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or more than £3.2 million at today’s prices – urgency and
instant demand carried the penalty of an inflated cost. These massive quantities of cloth were used to hang in the chapels and to drape the cortège, as well as to make the hooded cloaks and other apparel for the mourners and official guests at the funeral.

Between eight and nine o’clock in the evening of 2 February – the feast of Candlemas – Henry’s bulky coffin was moved to the palace chapel, escorted by the officers of his household, the esquires of the body and other noblemen and gentlemen ‘both spiritual and temporal, and placed in their degrees’ or order of precedence. The coffin was positioned beneath a hearse supported by six pillars, which was festooned with eighty-two foot-long square wax tapers, heraldic pensils (small pennons) and escutcheons of arms. At the four corners stood banners depicting saints, their images woven in fine gold thread upon damask, and over all hung a huge canopy of rich cloth of gold. In total, 1,800 lb. of wax were used to adorn the hearse. It must have been a magnificent, bright, colourful spectacle in the candlelight, made sombre only by the black cloth draping the interior of the chapel. A wooden rail surrounded the hearse, containing seats for the twelve chief mourners, led by Henry Grey, Third Marquis of Dorset. At its foot stood

an altar, covered with black velvet, adorned with all manner of plate and jewels of the vestry, upon which … there was said mass continually during the time the corpse was there remaining.
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The next day, between nine and ten in the morning, the herald Gilbert Dethicke, Norroy King of Arms,
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resplendent in his richly embroidered tabard, stood at the choir door facing the people and cried out in a loud voice:

You shall of your charity, pray for the soul of the most famous Prince, King Henry VIII, our late most gracious King and Master.
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So began a series of Requiem Masses held night and day, the clouds of incense billowing towards the chapel’s vaulted ceiling, each celebrated by three out of nine nominated bishops, all splendid in mitre and full pontifical vestments. Ironically, the irascible and devious Gardiner, only
recently banned from the precincts of the Palace of Westminster during one of Henry’s last, violent explosions of temper, was to lead all the services, as he was prelate of the Order of the Garter. Daily, before each Mass,
placebo
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and
dirige
, Norroy repeated the late king’s style of address.

Amid the mourning, Gardiner found time to write an outraged letter to Paget on 5 February, complaining about plans to stage a play by John de Vere in Southwark, to be performed by the Earl of Oxford’s actors – ‘lewd fellows’, he called them – just before Henry’s state funeral. Piously, the bishop wrote that the next day the parishioners of Southwark

and I have agreed to have solemn dirige for our late sovereign lord and master, as becomes us, and tomorrow certain players of my lord of Oxford, as they say, extend on the other side, within this borough of Southwark, to have a solemn play to try who shall have most resort, they in game or I in earnest …

I follow the common determination in sorrow till our late master be buried. And what the lewd fellows should mean in the contrary, I cannot tell or cannot reform it and therefore write to you …

I have spoken with Master Acton, justice of peace, whom the players [hold in] small regard and press him to a peremptory answer, whither he dare let them play or not.

Where unto, he answers neither yes nor no as to the playing; but as to the assembly of people in this borough, in this time, neither the burial finished nor the coronation done, he does not plead with the players until he has a commandment to the contrary.

But his ‘no’ is not much regarded, and mine less, as party to players …
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The actors’ plans were incomprehensible to the wrathful bishop, and symptomatic, he believed, of the moral decline in London, a city notoriously infected with the new evangelism. Although he still dwelt out in the cold as far as the Privy Council was concerned, no doubt they quickly discovered that he was very much in earnest and the play was cancelled.

On 7 February, more than 21,000 poor Londoners crowded into Leadenhall and the nearby churchyard of St Michael’s Cornhill, to be each handed a groat, a silver coin worth 4d (or just under £5 in twenty-first-century purchasing power) as a dole, or alms, to encourage them to pray for the king’s soul. Such was the clamorous press of the great unwashed that the distribution that day lasted from noon until six in the evening, from two separate doorways.
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The next night they got their chance to fulfil their side of the bargain: every parish church in the city kept a solemn
dirige
for the departed despot, with all the bells ringing a knell, followed the next day by a Requiem Mass said in all the churches of England.

Meanwhile, work was continuing on the massive gilded chariot that was to convey Henry’s body to Windsor and on a life-size effigy of the king that was to lie atop the coffin, beneath a canopy. The face was probably fashioned in wax, but the body was stuffed like a common tailor’s dummy beneath its sumptuous robes, garments specially made for the funeral. The carver responsible was almost certainly Nicholas Bellin of Modena, who had been working on Henry’s tomb, still lying partially completed at Westminster and Windsor, after components from the disgraced Cardinal Wolsey’s grandiose monument were appropriated by the king seventeen years before. The Florentine serjeant painter Antonio Toto also decorated the escutcheons bearing the king’s and other royal arms for the chariot and hearses, as he had for the funeral of Jane Seymour on 12 November 1537.
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Joiners, blacksmiths and other artisans were hard at work constructing the chariot, the frame for its canopy of estate and the metal sockets for the fourteen banners to be fixed to its sides and ends.
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There were other important tasks to complete before the funeral could take place. An order was issued for the

clearing and mending of all the highways between Westminster and Windsor whereas the corpse should pass: and the noisome boughs cut down [on] every side [of] the way [to prevent] prejudicing of the standards, banners and bannerols.
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And where the ways were narrow, there were hedges opened
[cut down] on either side so as the footmen might have free passage, without tarrying or disturbing of their orders.
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Bridges along the route were also checked in case they required repairs. At Windsor, the cortège’s destination, the route from the castle bridge to the west door of St George’s Chapel was lined with timber railings, all hung with black cloth and emblazoned with the king’s arms, to hold back the crowds of spectators. Lord Worcester, the king’s almoner, broke off from his now daily distribution of alms, given ‘to the great relief and comfort of the poor people’ at Leadenhall and at the Palace of Westminster, to arrange for two laden carts to deliver boards painted with heraldic arms to the forty-one parishes in Middlesex, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire through which the funeral procession would pass, or those near the route. His deputies also distributed dole money and torches to the priests at each church.

Concurrently, the arrangements for Edward’s coronation were also being made. On 8 and 12 February, Hertford delivered gold and gemstones from Henry’s secret jewel house at Westminster to be made into a new crown for the boy king.
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The coronation ceremonies were also redrafted ‘lest their tedious length should weary the king, being yet of tender age’.
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On Sunday 13 February, three solemn Masses were said over the old king’s coffin, which was still resting within its hearse in the chapel of the Palace of Westminster. The first was a Mass of Our Lady, conducted by two bishops dressed in white vestments; the second was a Mass of the Trinity, with the bishops in blue pontificals; and the third was a Requiem Mass, said by Gardiner himself, dressed in black. Throughout, the Marquis of Dorset, as chief mourner, ‘with all the rest of the lords … were [seated] and kneeled within the hearse, the chapel and all the people keeping silence’. At the end, the bishops liberally blessed the corpse with incense before withdrawing into the vestry, the choir singing ‘
Libera me, Domine
’.

All men wearing black livery were ordered to gather at Charing Cross by five o’clock the next morning for the first stage of the funeral
procession to Syon, on the banks of the River Thames in Middlesex. The destination was the former Bridgettine house surrendered to the crown in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. With typical Henrician efficiency, part of it had been used in 1545 as a factory for manufacturing munitions for the wars against France and Scotland.
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The procession took some time to assemble, for once on the move it would stretch out for four miles and include more than 1,000 horsemen, as well as many hundreds on foot, all carrying torches. The now completed chariot, drawn by eight great horses draped in black,
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six of them ridden by ‘a child of honour’ carrying a banner of the dead king’s arms, moved to the door of the chapel:

The corpse with great reverence [was escorted] from the hearse … by mitred prelates … two and two in order, saying their prayers; torches plenty on every side, the corpse born [sic] by sixteen yeomen of the guard under a rich canopy of blue velvet fringed with silk and gold … [held] up by six blue staves with [knots] of gold [carried] by the Lords Burgavenny, Conyers, Latimer, Fitzwater, Bray and Cromwell.
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Henry’s vain need for the trappings of majesty had survived beyond his death. The coffin was slid on to the chariot and covered with a pall of rich cloth of gold. On top was placed the funeral effigy of the dead king – ‘a goodly image like to the King’s person in all points, wonderfully richly apparelled in velvet, gold and precious stones of all sorts’. The Spanish chronicler, apparently an eyewitness, also wrote: ‘The figure looked exactly like that of the king himself and he seemed just as if he were alive.’
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Upon the head of the ‘picture’, or effigy, which wore a black satin nightcap, was placed ‘a crown imperial of inestimable value, a collar of the Garter about his neck and a garter of gold about his leg’.
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On the feet were crimson velvet shoes, specially made.
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Two gold bracelets set with pearls and jewels had been slipped on to the effigy’s wrists, a ‘fair arming sword’ laid by its side and a sceptre placed in the right hand, an orb
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in the left. Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Herbert scrambled up on to the chariot to take their seats at the head
and foot of the coffin as the effigy was secured to the pillars, or uprights, of the chariot’s superstructure with silken ribbons.

The chariot remained stationary for two hours while the heralds and marshals ensured that everyone took their correct places in the procession.

About eight of the clock, the weather being very fair, and the people very desirous to see the sights, the nobles mounted their horses and marched forward with the noble corpse.
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At the head rode John Herd and Thomas Mervyn, two porters of the king’s household, carrying black staves and acting as ‘conductors’ to clear the way ‘that neither cart, horse nor man should trouble or cumber them in this passage’.
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Behind them walked the choir and priests of the Chapel Royal, singing orations and prayers, led by a crucifier. They were flanked by 250 ‘bedesmen’ – ‘poor men in long mourning gowns and hoods with badges on their left shoulders, the red and white cross in a sun shining, [with] a crown imperial over that’. Each one carried a burning torch as the cortège passed through the towns and villages, and two carts, filled with fresh supplies of torches to replenish those that had burnt out, accompanied their straggling lines.

The procession was ordered according to rank and status. Behind the choristers and bedesmen came Thomas Bruges, carrying a banner bearing a dragon, the badge of Owen Tudor; then came Sir Nicholas Sturley, carrying a banner blazoned with the Lancastrian emblem of a greyhound, accompanied by twelve London aldermen, followed by Lord Windsor with Henry VIII’s own lion banner. Behind him followed – two by two – lords and barons, viscounts, earls and bishops, in strict order of precedence, then the foreign ambassadors ‘accompanied with such lords as best could entertain and understand their language’. Francis van der Delft, as the representative of an emperor, was accorded a special place of status, mounted alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer now was unshaven, in fulfilment of a solemn vow made at Henry’s death to grow a beard in remembrance. Four heralds were assigned to ride about this section of dignitaries, ‘to keep order’.